Episode 76 - Domino's Ad Reviewed by The Boom!
This week on Advertisers Watching Ads, we debate the latest ad from Domino’s, chosen by our partners Contagious.
Is it truly a generous campaign or is it more of a feel-good exercise? What’s the true brand objective behind this ad and does it manage to hit it?
Ultimately, does the ad answer the “So what?” question consumers are likely to ask?
Find out the answers with our guests Kristof Neirynck (Future CMO of Avon) and Scott Morrison (Founder of The Boom!).
Transcript
The following transcript is automatically generated so may not be 100% accurate, but will give you a good idea of what was discussed.
Tom Ollerton 0:06
Hello and welcome to Advertisers Watching Ads. My name is Tom Ollerton, I'm the founder of Automated Creative, and this is a weekly show where brands watch other brands' ads and then talk about them. It's that simple. We brought you as ever by Contagious, our partners who helped choose the ad today. Thanks so much to those guys. So before we see this week's ad, let's meet this week's guests.
Kristof Neirynck 0:30
Hello, I'm Kristof. I used to be the CMO for Walgreens Boots Alliance for the Global Brands Division, so that's brands like No7, Soap and Glory, Liz Earle, and then consumer healthcare brands. But actually, I'm currently on a break and I'm starting my new role as the Global CMO for Avon early 2022.
Scott Morrison 0:49
My name is Scott Morrison. I'm a former CMO and commercial director for brands like Diesel and Levi's and Activision. I set my own business seven years ago called The Boom, and I now work with global brands and leaders to help create commercial, cultural, and creative impact in their business and teams.
Tom Ollerton 1:04
All right, guys. Let's see this week's ad.
Right. Scott, Domino's advertising, competing restaurants. What is going on?
Scott Morrison 3:30
Well, you wouldn't expect anything less from me than I mean, I just think this is the patronizing, schmaltzy, and lazy. It's just a lazy brief on a page bit of communications. It's like a book that should have been a blog post, frankly. Obvious insight for me, lazy solution. And reason is, it doesn't pass the "so what?" test for me and nor does it go far enough on the real issue, because the delivery market actually, globally is 150 billion. It's grown eight times or whatever over the last since 2018. And actually, the people who are driving that are the young people. And I hate saying Gen Z and millennials, but they are young people, right? And frankly, do they really care? They want convenience. They want to be... They don't care about all the stuff that's going on in the background. And therefore, this for me is a party political broadcast on behalf of Domino's. It's basically saying, "Oh, look, you know, the high delivery fees are crippling businesses and you should go back to..." It's like everyone looks at that, all the Gen Zs go, "I don't care." For me, lazy.
Kristof Neirynck 4:32
The thing is, you know, are they trying to communicate, "Look, we as Domino's, we're not on those apps." So if you want to order Domino's, go to our own app. So I can understand that one business objective of a brief could be convince people to come directly to our app. Second business objective could be, you know, just create some reputational damage to and troll Uber Eats and Deliveroo because we really don't like them. Or it could be a genuine, purpose driven, make you feel good about Domino's because they're such a nice company kind of thing. But here I feel they just all hashed it together. And then that's what you get in the execution where it starts off nice, and it's a great initiative in terms of, you know, helping support your, your local mates and competition. But then I think it goes horribly wrong when they then try to shoehorn this message about, you know, these Deliveroo apps, which I'm sure is a reality for these businesses. It just doesn't feel authentic and genuine.
Scott Morrison 5:30
You know, for me, it feels like it's such a big message and it's kind of that very bitter and sort of sweet bit of the bitter sweet bit is a kind of a little, here's a little give away. Here's a few, you know, sprinkling of cash that we've given from our $50 billion a year, you know, profit just to help people. And then we've made a two and a half minute feel about it. I was just like, "What?!"
Kristof Neirynck 5:52
If this is really about genuinely helping small businesses, then do it and do it in a genuine way and make that a big part of your CSR policy, whatever have you. And have something about supporting local neighborhoods. But, you know, do that then and don't try to shoehorn other stuff in.
Tom Ollerton 6:08
Does it really matter? There's that sort of memory or that, you know, brand equity that they've earned from this, that it makes them feel more, make pizza feel more appealing and then Domino's more appealing than the others. Hasn't it done the job? I mean, this isn't a full 360 campaign that's going to run for five years. It's not platform. It's just an execution. And isn't it just cute and nice enough to make people think a bit more favorably about Domino's, even if it doesn't deliver on all the things that you mentioned before?
Scott Morrison 6:34
If they want to take this economic argument and say, "Look, fees are really high on everything else," right? Well, they could've done is they could have run some classes online. I'm just making this up, but they could have run some classes online for all mom and pop stores across the world because it could have done it, saying, "Right. Here are three courses. We've got one on the economics of, of delivery, how to make the most of it. Two, you know, how to run your business more efficiently to make sure that, you know, pricing strategies and things that we've learned from Domino's franchisees that will help you really boost your business." And they could probably spend 100 grand and done that really well and had a global reach. They could have taught lots of people generation after generation and the feel good factor of that and just call it the Domino Academy, for example. The feel good factor of that lasts a lot longer because you're adding generational benefit.
Kristof Neirynck 7:20
Here it feels they're trying to do a few things that are not necessarily entirely purpose driven, and it feels a bit more tactical and self-serving, frankly, than it, than it's truly helping those local businesses because for perspective, they put... If this is more than 100K, they put $50 million into free food when you were ordering directly from their Domino's app in August, and that was also branded. You know, this is an action against some of these big delivery companies. So, you know...
Tom Ollerton 7:53
What can the industry learn from this?
Kristof Neirynck 7:55
Be clear on what you're trying to do. I was really struggling trying to articulate, is this a piece of feel good advertising and more upper funnel kind of brand equity building kind of stuff? Or is this something that they were trying to convince people to move to their own app or whatever? So it was just all a bit confusing. So be single minded, I think about what you're trying to do. And then the second point for me is don't try to, you know, save the world and try to, you know, do something really purposeful in trying to mix in some other business objectives, because that's in the back of your mind, and I think that's what they're trying to do here, which then runs the risk of being perceived as not authentic.
Scott Morrison 8:37
Two things delivery could have done here, right. They could have said, actually, what the same thing we are is a massive distribution opportunity like we can distribute whatever we want, whenever we want at very low cost because we're already driving around everywhere. So was this something that they could have done that could have helped society a little bit more? Could they have distributed food parcels to people? Could they have distributed, I don't know, COVID tests to people that couldn't reach them? Whatever. You know, think about what your assets are. Second thing is, the biggest asset they've got is knowledge, right? Knowledge to help share with other people in a really kind of powerful and beneficial way, which could have helped these businesses do something very different economically, how they run their restaurants. There's a goodwill thing there. But again, that's free. The knowledge is sitting in the business and for 100 grand, they could probably put together something really, really powerful.
Tom Ollerton 9:23
So we're at the end of the episode now, and I'm going to ask you to give this execution a vote out of five. So one, two, three... A two and a two. Kristof, Scott, thank you so much for your time. See you all next week.
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